What's the best filesystem battery-wise for laptops?

[Net Llama!]

Bob Raymond wrote:
> This question may have been asked before, and I apologize if it has, but
> my friend has a problem with battery life on his laptop.  He only gets 
> about
> fifty minutes to an hour in Linux, while in WindeXP, it's more like two
> hours.  One thing I notice in Linux is that there's a lot more HD useage
> going on.  Could this be because of the ReiserFS that's on there now?

More likely because his system isn't properly tuned, or he's doing 
things that are I/O intensive.  I've give 512MB of swap, other wise, 
he's going to use up all the physical memory & swap, and then the system 
is going to grind to a hault, as it keeps paging in & out of memory.

> 
> He's coming over Sunday so I can install SuSE 8.0 (to replace 7.3) and I
> noticed XFS is one of the options.  I know from personal experience that
> it is faster than ReiserFS, but how good is it on the batteries, or is
> the filesystem even the problem?

The filesystem has little to no effect.  I'd wager good money that 
windozeXP is not spinning up his HD to 5400rpm, and is halving his CPU 
clock speed in order to save power.  apm can definitely help with this 
stuff in Linux (as could the BIOS, possibly), however the question comes 
down to whether he wants performance or battery life.

Something else to consider is his kernel, which i really doubt was 
optimized for a mobile system, or his CPU.

> 
>
> 
> specs:
> 
> Sager NP5620
> Intel P4 1.8ghz
> ATI Mobility Radeon 7500
> 30GB 5400 RPM HD,
> Part. table:
> 
> 8mb /boot /dev/hda1

That's a wee bit small.  I'd give it at least 15MB.


> 15GB (approx). / /dev/hda2
> 256mb (approx). swap /dev/hda3
> 14GB (approx). /windoze/C /dev/hda3
> 
> 256mb PC2100 DDR

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                       	       netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo: 		    http://netllama.ipfox.com

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